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How do I go about extending heating? I have a plant - pump - exchanger set networked, with all functioning properly, but neither the pump nor the exchanger have an input point and neither are getting hot water. E: nvm, small and large don't work together at all. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Feb 22, 2022 |
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Feb 22, 2022 20:37
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Yeah, I got the parts around giving them proper volume of supply but just went "hmm I'm eventually gonna replace this small heating plant with a large one, I'll build large pipes/pumps/exchangers out", and the small plant wouldn't feed into the large system at all.
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Feb 22, 2022 20:55
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You can also manually import by sending the proper vehicle to a customs post. Fiddly, but more realistic, saves a bunch of money on shipping, and most importantly lets you transition super-easily from 'truck fetches at the border and brings to a depot' to 'truck fetches from the factory and brings to a depot' when you do get local production online.
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Mar 5, 2022 10:30
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TRYING to play Cosmonaut, but not being afraid to plop x thing you forgot or call on Uncle Joe to snap things like replacement power infrastructure into existence during an upgrade due to how painfully duplicative switchovers are, is honestly a great way to learn. Really rubs in that your primarily limiting factor is days of fed, housed, and transported labor. It's also useful to flowchart what leads to what. Ignoring services like police, secret police, and higher education, and advanced industry, it's roughly: 
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Mar 6, 2022 10:04
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I've been thinking about microdistricts while waiting for the new patch. The map is 16x16km, and there are three basic categories of distance on it: 250m~500m * Final power delivery - the most restrictive at around 250m * Final heat delivery * Foot travel including kindergarten ~2km * Bus transit, and the longest really viable for other services (shopping, fire/police, school/uni, heat pumping gets squirrely outside this) * General JIT delivery ~5km * Rail transit * Road stockpile filling Districts should be tileable to limit wasted room, which means a choice between triangles, squares, and hexes; since buildings are by and large rectangular triangles waste a lot at the points, and while squares have zero corner waste they would have varying distances between adjacent districts' centerpoints, meaning the districts must be smaller, overlapping orthogonally and thus wasting significant space on duplicated infrastructure. (500m between center-1,3,7,9 and center-5 means only 354m between center-2,4,6,8 and center-5.) So hexes, squares are exceptionally ugly anyway and there is the literally taken raion in микрорайо́н. So if grouped in 7, the basic residential microdistrict can be substation/heat exchanger/kindergarten/bus stop. The basic town core can be transformer and switches/substation/heating plant/coal storage and unloading/bus platform/rail station/school/uni/theater/sport/shop/pub/fire/police with housing in any spare space. The basic transit interface can be substation/HV wiring/construction office(s, I find it useful to split between staffing/highway/optional extra materials-only/framing/engineering)/construction storage and unloading/warehouses. In this, four microdistrict areas are left for either more residential space or dedication to an industry, two of which can directly border the transit interface and get in on the rail network for a terminal town. And the core can be in any tile of the seven without issues, especially as lower-density housing is replaced with higher-density opening room for more local services within each residential microdistrict. Or have transit+industry on two sides of an intermediary town and then put construction/warehousing in one of the three microdistrict spaces remaining after these, core, and at least one resi. Because the core taking bus traffic and doing JIT delivery can actually support 19-microdistrict or even 37-microdistrict groupings without major transit issues, this leaves leeway to either do very dense cities or conversely to scatter rural villages more organically, skipping around mountains or water. E: Because heating is ~350m and walking is 400m (though constricted by roads and paths rather than as the crow flies), you get heating and services on any industrial hex face bordering a residential, too, if you want to have baseline staffing that can walk to a given plant even in snow/fuel/traffic catastrophies. Foot and road traffic don't seem to interact so the main RL reason for microdistricts, avoiding required pedestrian crossing of arterial roads, isn't there to interfere, but you can always put raised footbridges in for realism. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Mar 26, 2022 |
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Mar 26, 2022 20:27
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"How many people will I need" in itself is also a trap question, because it will vary--the actual length of a shift gets tweaked subtly by weather and traffic; the output per worker-day in a successful game will first decline and then rise as it's tied to loyalty, which has a lower base equilibrium than new immigrants start with but will be boosted higher as you expand into broadcasting and luxuries; your population will grow on its own and require more services even if they're not doing anything; and most importantly, industries are almost never 1:1 along the chain. Sometimes this is a simple "farms have several fields, bakeries draw from several farms", but more often it's something like the chain for electronics where one plant wants 39% of an electronic components plant, 10% of a mechanical components plant, and 15% of a plastics factory, which themselves require 4.01 chemical plants, 1.34 oil rigs, 0.01 woodcutting posts, 0.07 steel mills, 0.22 coal processing plants, 0.05 coal mines, 0.13 iron processing plants, 0.3 iron mines, 0.02 gravel plants, and 0.02 quarries to run at full. Flipped around, you can see that if you're just hiving the electronics industry off as solely its own thing, you will need 100 plants and 401 chemical plants to justify a dedicated woodcutter with no slop. Not a very easy thing to do in a test game.  The best way to get started is to spin up fully automated oil or bauxite export so you'll always be able to import in a pinch, and then lean into the slop, using it to identify what you can do next. You have the one electronics plant because you need electronics, and it's not running at full tilt, but that's okay as long as your people are getting the electronics they want; in the meantime it means you've got a ton of electronic components, mechanical components, and steel that can be turned into cars.
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May 3, 2022 21:37
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Population side, too. Okay, you only need the steel 50 workers can churn out? You're too lazy to ship it to the border even so you're just sitting there at can't export - storage full? That plant is still keeping 450 extras employed and happy while you figure out something useful for them to do. Run too lean and you deathspiral hard through unemployment into disloyalty and crime, provide makework and you're out at worst the cost of the extra buses.
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May 4, 2022 01:11
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Not that it's a very satisfying system, but unless you're getting hosed by a lack of accessible rock faces on your map (Morgenrot is annoying for this) you've basically got 400m of walking distance to fit the quarry and plant in, then have a bus stop further down the road and the loops only intersect when the dumpers need gas.
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May 5, 2022 18:14
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Now that I think of it, do you really even need workers for stone in a standard start? I'd never thought of skipping out on them, but giving it a try now excavators do the same job in quarries as they do in bauxite mines. Which also makes it a lot more simple to have a remote outpost and conveyor poo poo down, if you're only thinking about getting a tanker every couple weeks up that hill rather than hikers every shift.
Mandoric fucked around with this message at 22:50 on May 5, 2022 |
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May 5, 2022 22:47
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For whatever reason, stoplights are displaying as power substations for me in the build UI. They don't, sadly, actually pass power.
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May 6, 2022 18:54
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Being able to import labor is only going to make those export-only resource outposts more appealing. Now I'm thinking of alternate ways, within the gameplay loop, to avoid using even that. A tent category of housing that takes fabric and wood but no labor days? Mobile homes, implemented as containerized vehicles that get hauled to a plot from the border or their factory and transform into buildings when placed? (It'd be supremely hacky, but I'd guess you could do this by having them contribute huge numbers as a mechanism on site but only to a construction phase only they have.) Hihohe posted:My dream update is some sort of modular factory system so that i can put the aggregate elevators where i want on Factories Imagine conveyor (etc) subbuildings that work like heliports.
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May 9, 2022 14:07
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You can condense some of that down. Import distro office to a storage complex near the border with large vehicles + civic distro office for your starter ~2km plot with midsized to small vehicles; a lot of buildings simply can't take a full RTTN load of their resource, or barely can but you have to run them down to the very minimum--by splitting import distribution and civic distribution up you can run full loads every time while minimizing usage of the customs post's limited bays. You can run direct import-to-factory for big eaters without running into this issue. Later on when you're in multiple map grids and supply everything yourself, you can do a storage depot for each square fed and evened out between each other over rail, and repurpose the import DO for factory supply. And supplying fuel to every fuel-using building isn't necessarily optimal, since it's just used as a gas station exclusively for mechanisms stationed there. General prio is I'd guess fire stations with helicopter (which otherwise need to zigzag to an airport which you have to have!) > emergency services in general (which otherwise need to refuel during a call) >>> construction offices with slow mechanisms (which otherwise trundle to the gas station at a leisurely 15kph) >>>>>>>>> distro offices or construction offices that specialize in materials distribution. I split COs into 2 or 4, (staffing/highway)/(framing/engineering), and fuel the highway one while letting the others feed from the normal gas station. Doing this also saves you a lot of headache and heartache during the long groundworks phases big buildings have, since you can assign only the highway department and not have 200 dudes and ladies bussing in to lean on shovels and wait a month for 500 tons of asphalt to arrive, only an excavator or a bulldozer. (Or assign only the staffing office to a steel plant or TV station or something if you've misbalanced your residential vs. industrial growth and have unemployment problems; it's still a job even if you just cancel it once the industry you actually want goes up.) Petrostate/bauxite state also don't require labor, only electricity and fuel. You can plop one anywhere on the map you have deposits near a customs post and it will just silently produce rubles or dollars; eventually you can run your trunk line all the way out to it and just feed those resources in to more conveniently located processing plants or conversely send workers out on trains.
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May 11, 2022 16:09
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As dumb as it seems, the grid snap was huge for me, at least in getting from "stabilized foreign reserves ok that's enough for this save" to "if I just wait two years on rail construction I can be one resource closer to autarkhy, hmm let's lay out a new chome for the people turning 21 by then". SC2k brainworms run deep. The next resource run is even longer, I'm contemplating whether it might be quicker to run parallel temporary wooden track intersecting back in every km or so and having 4 or 8 rather than 2 constructor trainsets on the job. If only I could only ship crappy constructors on flatbed.
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May 13, 2022 06:12
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Yeah, the university handling is deceptive on a few levels. Only university-educated can do particular jobs, including teaching at university and teaching at primary school, so you'll want one far earlier than the physical size, almost requiring its own substation-radius, and existence of support buildings implies. There's a smaller, almost-cheaty УБ-1-49 in the recommended mods from earlier in the thread to accomplish this. However, the existence of the support buildings is not to make the university work faster, but to let you limit university admissions by having housing that will semiautomatically house only people with 1 < edu. level < 2 and that can be placed to be the only housing that can physically get to the university and study. If you have a centrally-located university, everyone will attend, which seems to be bad for advanced manufacturing as there's a separate "engineer" job type that seems to work by scaling the output of normal workers rather than directly contributing work, and that edu. level >= 2 agents will preferentially take. Which tanks output if there are say 100 people in the auto plant arguing over which ball bearings to use and only 10 actually bolting things together. E: Grid freed me in the opposite direction, now I can justify imprecise placements, even imprecise placements because I wasn't paying attention, as "just working with the terrain", "just adding an accent", or "because there isn't a precise grid alignment for the hex-around-substation meme I'm trying to force". Mandoric fucked around with this message at 17:53 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 17:51
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I dropped a UB near the city center in initial non-buy buildout of my current run that's very dense (5.5k pop all in one 500m long-chord hex that still has room for more housing), and currently have 100% higher educated. Which is telling me that it's something I don't necessarily want to use in the future, like the cheater substations; early convenient access to higher education kind of obviated the intended pressure of being limited in skilled labor. The higher educated will of course settle for being workers if it's the only slot the building has, and eventually settle for being workers once there are a lot of engineers, even not necessarily capped engineers; my vehicle production line is currently at 160/60. But in the 1.5k to 3k pop band when education completed but I was still very shorthanded, there were a lot of times when it was more like 10/40, and production suffered if I wasn't microing the staff count. The bigger problem I had was with my primary school, which sometimes ended up 0/5 and would have been over capacity if crunched down to 3. I ended up manually assigning my newest housing, with my freshest 21-year-olds who hadn't quite finished their degree, to it. Once there were enough people, it evened out.
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May 13, 2022 19:09
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For concrete, yes, it will draw from either substation or direct pipe. The appeal of the pipe is throughput, and that drinking water is not strictly necessary at workplaces, so if you have an industrial complex you can just serve it directly without a separate building and more pipe spaghetti. Water loading stations specifically need the pipe; I cut off one of mine to see and while it did seem to get some water even after, technical services no longer recognize it as a valid source and send out trucks. Your problem with water otherwise is probably that neither wells nor purification plants pump. You want a pump on either side of the purification plant, something that's more intuitive if using surface water intakes than if wells. As for job prioritization, also remember that water and heat aren't SimCity-style "is this infrastructure connected" checks, the well or heating plant actually produces m³ of water or steam as a resource that is then moved through a pipe like it would be through a conveyor to a substation that magicks it the last 300m into a storage in each individual building where it is consumed. So if you have an hour or two hiccup during shift change, it's not good--overextended or underprovisioned lines may only be slightly over usage rate, and take a looooong time to build back up--but it's not immediately fatal.
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Jun 2, 2022 19:07
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Demon_Corsair posted:How far will trucks in construction offices drive? I'm going to be building a good stretch away from my concrete and asphalt plants. Or is it better to build new ones as you go? They'll drive forever to sources, but exactly 5km and no further to jobs. So it's definitely necessary to layer out COs as you go, but concrete/asphalt (which, remember, need workers) should only be done if you're putting up an entire new town; caches of other materials, it depends on proximity to rail/border since otherwise it's the same truck haul either way plus extra for the actual storage and loading facilities.
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Jun 2, 2022 23:14
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If you go far enough, you actually can get out of manual assignment range (unless behavior differs between manually from the job and manually from the CO? I want to say I've tried both ways with a particular development I have going, or to be precise not going yet until the rail line hits.) For both standard and helo, helo just calculates it line-of-sight.
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Jun 2, 2022 23:39
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The game is sometimes finicky about which connections allow work, but it looks like there it's just plain not connected. Parallel-snap especially, but also grid or perspective, sometimes decides that you want the new segment to be offset if you lay it far to near; near to far, conversely, sometimes snaps xy but takes the specified z rather than sloping.
Mandoric fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 16:52
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While we're on the subject of connectors, I wonder if it's possible to mod in utility tunnels, Prague style. Something with a notably higher labor and concrete/steel/electrical components cost than a single buried segment, and limited capacity on the water/sewer/heat ends than a full pipe, but less labor and more space-efficient/less finicky about lines crossing than burying all four (for now) services separately. E: Even better if it could handle the biggest non-aesthetic use of real ones, being able to build out a higher-capacity segment at aboveground costs while also maintaining the old service until completion. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 17:28
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Demon_Corsair posted:This was it, thank you! Not sure I missed it. The easiest way is to just find a bare stone patch on flat ground. But if your map doesn't have those, also remember that working mechanisms don't require human input, so you don't have to worry about the whole walkable from bus stop/short trip back down thing; you can sink a pit directly in the rock face and have a cheap low-speed bridge coming directly out of it, send a fuel tanker up once every month or two, and have a fleet of dumptrucks circling between it and the nearest semiflat ground for a road aggregate unloader, then build a conveyor line from there down to a storage/road aggregate loader on level ground, and finally run dumpers from that to the processing plant on level ground and near a bus stop. IIRC the dump trucks will even refuel while at the quarry, but even if they don't you can just do a staggered overprovision (add a third and fourth to the route when the first two are at half tanks) and it'll continue to run at near-full capacity while half are meandering down to a gas station. E: Throw the quarry down almost at the bottom of the face, build a bridge to fill the gap so it's still on the face and not on flat ground itself, go from there. No quarried stone aggregate storage/conveyor setup even necessary, just put the gravel processor there. I'd also like to see, since there are already a range of wood-or-brick, brick-or-prefab, and prefab-or-concrete materials choices for residential in base and many buildings in mods, a use for quarried stone other than turning it into gravel. Maybe allow building of things that look somewhat like the map generator ones, or incorporate it into certain monuments. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 18:04
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Demon_Corsair posted:Any tips for making walkable areas? I think I'm always trying to pack too much stuff in one block. I just noticed that a chunk of my new block can't reach the school. There's a tug of war between centralizing key services to avoid duplication, and avoiding downtown traffic. In general, kindergarten/store/entertainment/utilities need to be right in the middle, but also kindergartens eventually have to be duplicated at max density. As an illustration, here's my current not-quite-right-but-works experiment:  I've taken the word микрорайон too literally and built a quite literal man-hive, but it actually works decently well, with around 10k happy, healthy, employed citizens. Places for improvement are: * Remember to not crowd the main street with buildings so hard that I can't fit a footbridge--my people don't seem to mind playing chicken and, perhaps because it's designated a no heavy traffic area, nothing much gets slowed down, but it's irking. * Leave a corridor behind the mall to run an industrial connector to a warehouse, to further avoid a need for cargo down the middle * Ideally, eventually tear out main street and replace it with tram+footpaths. * Bus platforms can live in small suburban hexes as the 400m walk radius gives you room around halfway in to cover all of the neighbor plus that entire sextant-plus of the central district. Alternately, they can also exist offset in the main one; the new second platform to the south can feed from anything closer than the football pitch/hotel, and is used to segregate the mass amounts of traffic going to a dedicated commuter train to my steelworks. * Power usage for this density eventually requires 2x substations; I used one of the cheater look-ma-no-wires ones in the modpack due to spaghetti underfoot, but planned it's just a small switch connected to two normals. * Figure out how to sustain enough passenger throughput from suburbs in adjoining hexes. Then, put suburbs in adjoining hexes. The long diagonal of the hex is ~500m and sides are ~250m, meaning around 430m side-to-side. Electric doesn't really overlap, heat/sewage/water do.
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Jun 4, 2022 00:08
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It has its downsides. Apart from being fiddly to set up, curves mean road traffic around it has more distance to cover and does it at slower speeds, and of course overhead infrastructure where you have say 15m between support pillars gets real tetchy crossing roads at a 30° difference to it. Also the game's grid isn't exactly on 5-10m blocks so there's probably a little deformation that will show up eventually. That said, to do it: * Plan an asphalt or gravel road 245m in length. * Build a short dirt stub directly on from it to create an intersection that you can later build road directly to, rather than it curving to try to make a loop. {Sadly, dirt roads don't report distance so you can't just use them.) * Plan another non-instant road 245m in length from the opposite end, and also build a stub from it. * At 90° angles from the intersection, plan roads 215m in length. Give them stubs too. * From the ends of the paved portions of the shorter roads, go off each direction 127m at a 90° angle. Give them, as usual, stubs. * Now you should have a sort of Ж shape. Connect the paved-dirt intersections. If everything's even, each of these connections should be 245m. * Delete the stubs and any of the central pieces you don't want, then build. * Expand using the same process from there; each 60° internal angle just gets matched by another 60° internal angle across the road orthogonal to the grid and a １２０° internal angle across the road heterogonal to the grid. Sometimes you'll have 250s or 254s instead of 245s, the grid just doesn't play perfectly nice. I'd probably limit it to a 7-hex complex for a downtown to avoid skewage messing things up; this can presumably house 70k-100k people depending on how many you can funnel into services with local transit, which feels more than enough for a downtown/county seat-ish centerpiece city on a 16kmx16km rural map anyway. * Or delete the entire hex after using its yellow ghost to lay out an area safe to be fed by a single power substation.
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Jun 4, 2022 02:04
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Apart from the other tips, many job phases are both unbalanced and internally gated; that is, they take x loads of resource class a and y loads of resource class b, and x is far larger than y; and further resource b works on resource a faster than it can be delivered. In general this always shows up for groundworks, which require copious asphalt and concrete, resources which are further rate-limited in a way most aren't. Many big buildings also require a few hundred tons of prefab or bricks onsite, which workers will prop up faster than they can be unloaded, and the longest connectors take surprising amounts of mechanical/electrical components. For this reason, a dedicated staffing CO is great. Give it only busses, and only set it to work a site once a buffer of materials are built up. Maybe put cranes here as well since they also rely on framing materials being onsite. Conversely, a highway CO can take advantage of all highway work being doable by mechanisms and not needing staff at all. And unlike most CO vehicles, these are slooooow rollers so you don't want them to take a trip to the gas station; segregating them all neatly in their own CO lets you DO fuel to it and only it, saving entries on that 20-site table. Aggregates can go with highway to begin with, they're needed for highway construction, but as you expand you'll want more dumpers than can fit with excavators and more pavers than can fit with dumpers. Framing also needs large bulks, though it's not as throughput-constrained at pickup as aggregates. Early engineering can work from the framing CO; engineering in general rarely justifies a full CO, maybe for long ski lift or power line hauls, so I often go through combined→one framing, one engineering→one framing, one combined as I scale up flatbeds faster than covered. You can also reduce total drive distances by keeping them near the sites they pull from, which suggests staffing near downtown and aggregates near the gravel complex; framing and engineering pull from multiple of resources that aren't particularly close to each other on the map, so are best placed in a central warehouse district that pulls via DO from each of gravel/iron/coal/oil districts during downtime.
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Jun 4, 2022 17:59
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The only real mechanical influence of fire is holding down the cash potential of a fully-automated oil or bauxite field off in metaphorical (possibly literal?) Siberia--no workers means no firefighters means an occasional cash-rebuilding tax. It makes me inordinately proud, though, when I hear a sudden whop-whop-whop and some hero of the people is off to save his simulated comrades. (Longterm, maybe post-1.0 even, I'd love to see a degradation mechanic to encourage a choice between repairing in place or redeveloping my oldest stuff; fire, governed by the speed of response, could provide this. It'd also be nice to be able to build buildings pre-degraded at a lower cost to get big industries off the ground for little settlements.)
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Jun 4, 2022 22:58
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Demon_Corsair posted:How do you find a miniscule break in a road that has just been upgraded? I appear to have upgraded every section of a road, except no one will drive on it. Mighty BZ-252 dumper of moderately-great uncleland is driven at maximum speed of 300 border versta per day. Humble yet dedicated people's road has speed limit also of 300 border versta per day. Considerate Comrade Driver blah blah blah the Perfect Strangers-tier gimmick accent has already stopped being funny anyway. (Particular slow vehicles will preferentially run on roads they don't cap out on in order to improve traffic on roads where others can run faster. The BZ-252 exactly matches dirt roads anyway, so given at worst nearly equal lengths it will seek out dirt side roads to take; most medium-to-large haulers will do this for gravel.)
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Jun 5, 2022 00:54
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Also re CO progression: The most efficiency is in having 4-6 in an area, but the most fun is cash building one since you're forced to, putting up the second near your basic gravel chain once it's done and moving aggregates and highway mechanisms there, putting up the third near your first Big Four factory once it's done and dedicating it to framing/engineering, and so on.
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Jun 5, 2022 03:19
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A decent rule of thumb is that vehicles move at half-ish speed in snow, so if you don't either have tech services provisioned or a sacrificial black lung house, coming into October you'll want to increase the bus coverage on your heating plant route. But also note that if it's over a 2.5 game-hour drive, snow will make it over 5 and people will just peace out. With education enabled, when workers enter the job system daily their first check is whether they have a child; if they do they will either place it in a kindergarten instantly and then latch onto another job, or take the "job" of caring for it which counts as unemployed. So if ie your kindergarten staff are calling out sick due to cold, your other workers will then be unemployed but not at bus stops. Since you can't set separate plow priority for specific roads, but can set it for road classes, and since technical services does not require workers, if snow is giving you trouble with getting workers to utilities, you can: * Build the actual technical services building beyond one of them, and the bus stop feeding it before the road forks again. This forces every plow to scrape that route, at the cost of every plow spending probably a significant amount of time on it. * Use a road type specifically for routes to utilities. Of these: - Dirt, don't unless you have to. At least your BZ-252 as a hauler doesn't mind it for heat or coal-fired electric plants. - Gravel is extremely cheap to do, especially given that these are long hauls if they're causing trouble, and lets you use asphalt for most routes, but the various microbuses and taxis you'd want to use for low-capacity/high-frequency routes are the vehicles that benefit the most from asphalt. Most midsize haulers max out around here so that side isn't a problem. - Asphalt is great for staffing, but overbuilding for fuels unless you're also using small haulers or have progressed into the mid-70s or so where faster trucks come in. - Asphalt with lights, probably a no since you'll want to reserve that for downtowns. - Trolleybus is the most expensive option, and not hugely suitable for actually staffing the plant; you don't even catch up to the speed of 1960 start microbusses until 1979. However, how awkward it is to convert existing cities to use trolleys and how limited their application is (still need fuel for industrial vehicles, lower-density platforms, etc) means you probably won't be using them at all--and this means trolley catenaries/tracks can be established solely as guides for plow drivers if you're willing to tank the added cost. - One-way roads is entirely a question of traffic flow elsewhere in your plan. If you're not using them elsewhere you can simply build a short one-way loop beyond each utility and plow drivers should beeline for it if set to prioritize one-ways; if you are using them elsewhere (say, to simplify traffic flow at the border) this doesn't help at all. E: And yes, definitely a dedicated stop (and housing set to report only to it) at low local population relative to jobs available. If you're not interacting much with micromanaging where people work, you need a little baseline unemployment, and if you're using a populated map and haven't moved everyone out of their villages, you have to either build and staff a city hall and rely on its local figures, or do the math yourself. It's only once you set up a system where there's always someone to keep utilities running that you can then overbuild jobs and let everyone who doesn't get picked up filter down to the steel mill or aircraft plant. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Jun 5, 2022 |
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Jun 5, 2022 18:43
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Speaking of prepopulated maps--if you're worried about heating, the unbuildable old houses come with furnaces. So you can do year 1 with a limited population and the limited goal of getting basic services up and running, and only commit to modern housing once the basic design proves itself. But yes, the easiest solution is simply to have enough people that there's always something available. If you overbuild housing and risk ending up in an unemployment-driven crime spiral, that's where your staffing-only CO comes in--lay down five aircraft plants or something next to each other, assign only staffing, and you'll have 2500 or so people happily employed to stand in a field and wait for gravel that will never arrive. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jun 5, 2022 |
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Jun 5, 2022 19:17
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I will say, most of the advice we're giving on heating plants we'll be giving again on power plants, and that's one circumstance where electric isn't a plus. Never leave yourself in a position where the next shift of workers for a plant is stuck at home, or in transit, because the last shift left early, especially with electricity where you can't have a DO continue to top off fuel with imports even after your start cracking it yourself. (This also does depend on map position; if you're hooked to a foreign grid it's fine as long as you're cool with your #1 job being to throw the export/import switch during blackouts.)
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Jun 5, 2022 20:02
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Demon_Corsair posted:Is there a good rule of thumb for how long a bus route should be and how many buses I should have on it? In theory, length is just fixed by physical placement. Multistop routes are more if you're stuck with a limited number of high-capacity vehicles and want to specify, say, "everyone needed get out at the power plant, and only after that everyone left get out at the widget factory"; suited for rail or trolley truly mass transit, less suited for road vehicles where small point-to-point is an option. A bus should, in a vacuum, arrive every 8 hours carrying the entire capacity of the plant. But there's a short lag time to disembark, a walk of various length, and a short lag time to up tools, so more like 7:30. Beyond that, overprovisioning in case of traffic or snow helps--every 6 hours means each bus can safely spend 1:30 in a traffic jam or be delayed 1:30 by weather. This is where microbusses or gondolas shine. Rather than having 15 workers arrive at the heating plant just on time for their 8-hour shift, you can have 5 arrive every 2:40, and the plant will keep running even if two entire runs go missing or show up empty (say, because a construction order happened to hoover up everyone from the platform just before they arrived.) But conversely, microbusses are 3 meters of traffic for 7 people rather than 10 meters of traffic for 90 people, and gondolas need electricity and separate stations. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, always tradeoffs, and using what you can do confidently to cover for the iffy stuff.
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Jun 5, 2022 22:08
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This is correct. Some buildings have a "Max workers outside CO" value set, and opportunistically provide construction jobs; roads don't, and it's not (easily) moddable as buildings have a construction coefficient relative to their type rather than flat numbers.
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Jun 6, 2022 00:20
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I hope the speeds/capacities vary more from "a subset of currently-available busses" than the currently implemented trolleys, or that there's support for platform-to-platform connection with intercity rail while only using a single station. A lack of maintenance existing in the game kinda takes the shine off concrete roads, but I'm sure that at some point I'll make repaving cycles a thing I enforce upon myself and use them in places where doing so would cause too much of a mess.
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Jun 6, 2022 01:09
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Yeah, the idea of two road types is really cool for those distinctions. I just want to nitpick because, at least where I grew up, concrete was the more expensive to lay but far more durable option, laid down during the postwar boom and still extant with a few asphalt patches on certain major roads when I was learning to drive, while asphalt has been the quick-and-easy patch or connector that's eventually subsumed everything in an orgy of short-termist "when we knock out the road for an entire season in five years to repave, it'll be the next mayor's fault!" Ask me about 20km at 130kph on striated asphalt every 2 weeks to go shop because our local arterial's been pulled up and they could get the mechanism to mill it down in early April but it's June and still no sign of actual pavers. I'll describe it once I find the rest of my teeth.  Interesting point with concrete tramways, though--since they're tram-only no autos, wouldn't putting one in the middle of a road, like say if you had a platform in the center of town and had 10-20m of concrete tramway in front of it, automatically forbid ALL through traffic? I don't believe we had any option to do that yet, only discourage it by type, weight, or max speed. Yet you'd visually, and for sidewalk purposes, keep the street continuous.
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Jun 6, 2022 03:10
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Demon_Corsair posted:Is there a way to see what buildings require electricity? And what the penalty is for buildings not being connected. The simplest way is just to hover like you're going to place it downtown; overlays on the map would be real nice, my hex-gridding is basically an effort to make my own overlays from roads, but the hover will give you your yellow/red/blue/brown lines for power/heat/water/sewage, linked approximately to the point on the building they officially terminate at, and then you just have to make sure that where you actually plop also has all the same lines. Or if you've got a built example already and just don't remember, you can check for voltage/steam tank/pressure/cleanout meters, or the menu bar of the building for the "hover to display connection" options. My guess is that the nonobvious power takers like COs/rail COs/etc have different rates of unloading/loading fuel or materials based on whether they can power a pump/conveyor, but I'm not entirely sure and it's not entirely easy to see with how fast those operations complete anyway. Meanwhile, no water for 8 hours at a worksite just doesn't perceptibly damage health, and no heat for 8 hours at an individual worksite does but not badly enough for a clinic not to be able to catch up given that there aren't fixed jobs so you're getting different agents each day. Wandering Orange posted:Somewhat related question - was there ever any mention of why Distribution Offices are limited to serving only 20 buildings? I usually end up with 2 or 3 DO's dedicated to fuel which just seems silly. It's probably just to encourage building more than one. Though 2-3 just for fuel sounds really high; remember, it just means that they act as gas stations for their assigned mechanisms, so most DOs (which by definition are ordering around decently speedy road vehicles) and COs (aside from those with mechanisms or heavy dumpers, or those as the first building in a new remote settlement) don't hugely benefit.
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Jun 10, 2022 00:21
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Demon_Corsair posted:This is exactly what I was looking for. Now I can at least ballpark how mamy coal mines I need. Just to reinforce, as a mindset thing, you need zero coal mines--what you need is at least one working heating plant, and ideally one working brick plant and one working coal power plant. Flagging coal access is far more important than how much coal you access. Now, it's always good to be mentally tracking your eventual layout as to how the other eventual mines where the resource availability splotch is may fit in a condensing network (4-to-1 for the various aggregates, 3-to-1 but not tied to straight lines for oil), ie put a storage on the edge and then run along the edge for the first couple if possible, but if nothing else it's extremely easy to work yourself into "let's actually build 36 oil rigs to power the refinery, except whoops let's actually build 144 oil rigs because at that density they're 25% at best" mistakes, or thinking you actually want the 20 chemical plants to "optimize" one plastics plant, and in turn 20 of these complexes per woodcutter.
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Jun 13, 2022 09:45
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Another thing to keep in mind for non-Cosmonaut play (or for being very, very precise in the Cosmonaut leadup): cash-rush is an option even after you've broken ground; you'll simply import the remaining materials and labor rather than all of them. And labor > shipping > materials. So on Cosmonaut, while labor doesn't progress until there's a little of everything onhand, you can still cut out some of the shipping charges by graveling up the first of your asphalt/concrete before buying it, and then supplying the concrete needed for an asphalt plant or vice versa as well. And if buying later buildings for whatever reason, you can save significant amounts of cash by completing the groundworks step yourself. Normally there aren't many reasons you'd choose to, if you're buying it's because you want it done now and "done in two weeks" isn't much better than "done in a month". But if you're playing an island map without border crossings and don't have the proper port up yet, or want to do a sort of inverse-Cosmonaut with the conceit of being a north Siberian outpost or something that will get sealifted construction crews but is so remote and unpopulated it needs to rely solely on its own production outside of those, you can stretch those limited rubles a lot further.
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Jun 20, 2022 17:46
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I live in dread of a day that concrete and asphalt become realistic and can only be unloaded when there are workers onsite to form and smooth them.
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Jun 25, 2022 00:58
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You can play with the priority logic a bit, depending on what else you've built in the area. In particular if you want most focus on a single road, but can't justify a divided highway/trolleyway/streetlighting down it all, you can build like 10m long stretches of one of those at either end and if the road you want covered is the most direct path between them IIRC the plow AI will happily go "well I did this trolley road, now I drive to the next trolley road with the plow down". There are also 1km, 2km, and 3km range settings to keep them from working their way to other parts of the map that may use these in earnest.
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Jul 31, 2022 15:20
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Also, since excavator/dozer/paver/roller only work with gravel/asphalt that get hauled in dumpers, and since cranes only work with steel/brick/planks/panels that get hauled on flatbed, when you're specializing COs you can split the hauling vehicles this way. I tend to put concrete in with the first batch because it's used in the same phase. Then you can have a separate CO with labor and only assign it to buildings once the hauling to them for a phase is complete. Saves a lot of guys standing around waiting for concrete and asphalt in particular. E: This also means leaning heavily into tower cranes, since you've got all those flatbeds right there anyway.
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Jul 31, 2022 21:50
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